Little Bee

When I came to the door, the undertaker glanced at the stump of my finger. People generally do, but rarely with that professional gaze that notes: Left hand, second finger, first and second phalanx, yes, we could fix that with a wax prosthetic, a slender one, with a light Caucasian flesh tone, and we could use Kryolan foundation to cover the join, and we could fold the right hand over the left in the coffin, and Bob would be your mother’s brother, madam.

I was thinking, Clever undertaker. If only I was dead, you could make a whole woman out of me.

“My deepest condolences, madam. We are ready for you whenever you feel ready to come.”

“Thank you. I’ll just get my son and my…well. My friend.”

I watched the undertaker ignoring the smell of gin on my breath. He looked back at me. There was a small scar on his forehead. His nose was flattened and skewed. His face registered nothing. It was as blank as my mind.

“Take all the time you need, madam.”

I went out into the back garden. Batman was digging away at something under the roses. I went over to him. He had a trowel and he was lifting a dandelion, pulling its root to the tip. Our resident robin was hungry and he watched from six yards away. Batman raised the dandelion from the soil and brought it close to examine its root. Kneeling, he looked up at me.

“Is this a weed, Mummy?” he said.

“Yes darling. Next time, if you’re not sure, ask before you dig it up.”

Batman shrugged.

“Shall I put it in the wild patch?” he said.

I nodded, and Batman carried the dandelion over to a small part of the garden where Andrew had given a home to such rascals, in the hope that they would attract butterflies and bees. In our small garden I have made a wild place to remind me of chaos, Andrew once wrote in his column. Our modern lives are too ordered, too antiseptic.

That had been before Africa.

Batman bedded in the dandelion among the nettles.

“Mummy, is weeds baddies?”

I said that it depended if you were a boy or a butterfly. Batman rolled his eyes, like a newsman interviewing an equivocating politician. I couldn’t help smiling.

“Who is that woman on the sofa, Mummy?”

“Her name is Little Bee.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“Not if you’re a bee.”

“But she isn’t a bee.”

“No. She’s a person. She’s from a country called Nigeria.”

“Mmm. Is she a goody?”

I stood up straight.

“We have to go now darling,” I said. “The undertaker is here to collect us.”

“Bruce Wayne?”

“Yes.”

“Is we going to the bat cave?”

“Are we going to the bat cave.”

“Are we?”

“Sort of.”

“Hmm. I is coming in a minute.”

I felt the perspiration starting on my back. I had on a gray woolen suit and a hat that was not black but a late-evening nod to it. It didn’t scorn tradition, but nor had it entirely submitted to darkness. Folded up over the hat was a black veil, ready to bring down when the right moment came. I hoped someone would tell me when that was.

I wore navy-blue gloves, which were borderline dark enough for a funeral. The middle finger of the left hand glove was truncated and stitched. I’d done it two nights earlier, as soon as I was drunk enough to bear it, in a merciful hour between insobriety and incapacity. The glove’s severed finger was still lying on my sewing table. It was hard to throw away.

In my suit pocket was my phone, set to quiet mode in case I forgot to do it later. I also had a ten-pound note ready for the collection, in case there was a collection. It seemed unlikely at a funeral, but I wasn’t sure. (And if there was a collection, was ten pounds about right? Five seemed ridiculously mean; twenty obscenely flashy.)

There was nobody left to ask about ordinary things. Little Bee was no use. I couldn’t ask her: are these blue gloves okay? She’d only stare at them, as if they were the first pair of gloves she had ever seen, which was quite possibly the case. (Yes, but are they dark enough, Little Bee? Between you and me-you as the refugee from horror and me as the editor of an edgy monthly magazine-would we call that shade blue, courageous, or blue, irreverent?)

Ordinary things were going to be the hardest, I realized. There was nobody to ask about them. This was something undeniable, now that Andrew was gone: there was nobody left with a strong opinion about life in a civilized country.

Our robin hopped out from the foxgloves with a worm in its beak. The worm skin was puce, the color of bruising.

“Come on, Batman, we have to go.”

“In a minute, Mummy.”

In the quiet of the garden then the robin shook his worm, and swallowed its life from the light into darkness with the quick indifference of a god. I felt nothing at all. I looked at my son, pale and bemused in the neatly planted garden, and I looked past him at Little Bee, tired and mud-stained, waiting for us to go through into the house.